Smart Move: California Is Most Popular Destination for 'Geniuses'

California is home to the most “geniuses” by way of transplants, according to the MacArthur Foundation; an organization that has since 1981 hand-selected and provided grants to individuals they deem to be among society’s most intellectually superior.

Vice President of the MacArthur Fellows Program Celia A. Conrad compared recipients of her foundation’s “genius grants” from the time the first awards were issued in 1981 to their latest awards in 2013 and found that California is home to more of these geniuses than almost any other state, according toLA Weekly.

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“Comparing birthplace to location at the time of the award, the most popular destination state for Fellows was California, followed by New York,” Conrad wrote in her analysis.

Additionally, Conrad, who refers to California as “the most popular destination state for fellows” found that California has received the highest number of MacArthur fellow transplants than any other state, with a total of 113 “geniuses” who opted to move here.

The U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of university rankings again placed the University of California Berkeley as the top public university in the United States overall. And according to Times Higher Education, based out of the United Kingdom, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is the best university in the world.

The next round of MacArthur fellow is slated to be announced on September 17. The nomination process is described here.